JISC

A summary of JISC's work and achievements for the year of 2003.

Foreword

The Rt. Hon. Charles Clarke MP
Secretary of State for Education and Skills

I am committed to e-learning.

Used effectively, it can contribute to all the Government’s objectives for education: raising standards; removing barriers to learning; preparing people for the workplace. And, ultimately, it can ensure that every learner achieves his or her full potential.

e-Learning can improve the learning experience. But it cannot replace teachers or lecturers. What it can do – alongside existing methods – is enhance the quality and reach of their teaching, and reduce the time spent on administration.

We are currently shaping our e-Learning Strategy in the light of responses to the consultation that ended in January, and in line with the priorities of our recent ‘Five Year Strategy for Children and Learners’.

The e-Learning Strategy is about making the best use of all the available resources: through effective procurement, value for money, cost modelling, and management for sustainability. Government funding for e-learning will increase to around £1 billion by 2005-06, and the cross-cutting nature of the Strategy offers potential economies of scale by combining approaches across organisations, sectors and communities.

Over the coming months we will be having extensive discussions with ministers from other departments, Board members, and the agencies that will be responsible for taking action to embed e-learning at every level. We hope to publish the completed Strategy this autumn.

JISC’s activities over the last year, detailed in this Annual Review, indicate the extent to which JISC is driven by the same commitment to standards, good practice and the removal of barriers to learning that will be at the heart of the e-Learning Strategy. The continued extension of the JANET network to an ever-widening community of users, the invaluable support and advice JISC offers to the further and higher education and research sectors, and its commitment to high-quality online content are clearly of immense value to the communities it serves.

I am committed to e-learning, and I am committed to the potential of all learners. I believe e-learning has the ability to make education a more exciting and fulfilling experience for each and every one of them. I look forward to JISC’s further contribution in the coming year to this exciting vision.  

Introduction

Professor Sir Ron Cooke
JISC Chair  

During my first year as Chair of JISC, I have rapidly come to appreciate JISC’s vital contributions to supporting information and communications technology in further and higher education, and the research community. JISC provides computing networks, on-line content, and between these two, ‘information environments’. For each of these communities JISC carries out research and development programmes and provides a wide range of services. This review describes some of JISC’s recent progress built on the last strategic plan that was concluded this year and the new strategic plan for the years 2004-06. It also reflects the commitment not only of the JISC staff, but also of the numerous practitioners who work with JISC.

This year we celebrate 20 years of ‘JANET’ – the computer network that is run by an organisation funded by JISC; United Kingdom Educational and Research Network Association (UKERNA). JANET shows what JISC does best: it has been a highly successful, innovative, high-quality and cost-effective service first to higher education and now to further education and beyond; its capacity has grown, as it should, slightly in advance of demand. We are now laying the foundations for SuperJANET5, whose capacity is likely to be 40 Gbps, four times that of its predecessor. JISC’s contributions to online content has been supplemented this year by, for instance, new journals, the entire online resources of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the products of our digitisation programme, such as online newspapers. These services continue to save participating organisations large sums of money. New online journal contracts this year alone are saving institutions £3-4 million.

But it is between ‘network’ and ‘content’ the so called ‘middleware’ and ‘information environment’ where JISC’s essential progress is perhaps less visible. The ‘integrated information environment’ through ‘interoperability’ and common standards will allow secure interchange of online resources between institutions, and will in turn help the evolution of such on-going vital matters as e-learning, e-science, ‘the virtual library’, ‘the virtual research environment’ and the ‘common information environment’. Advances in these areas this will inform JISC’s work on such current issues as text mining, digital curation, open access publishing and institutional repositories. All of this work will be essential, amongst other things, in advancing the Government’s ‘Science and Innovation Framework, 2004-2014’.

During the year, the Regional Support Centres (RSCs) have expanded their services beyond further education to small higher education colleges and specialist colleges. Now JISC is beginning to come to terms with the significant challenges in extending its services beyond FE into workplace learning and adult and community learning.

Download the full Annual Review 2004 below